The next segment of my Games of 2011 list begins with a PSP game: Dungeons & Dragons Tactics. This is one of the few 2011 games that I haven’t yet finished, and will likely continue playing well into 2012. I really like tactical battle RPGs, and this game does it fairly well. Since it’s turn-based, battles can sometimes be very time-consuming, but I grew up playing The Gold Box Games, and those were the slowest-paced strategy RPGs ever. D&D Tactics is fun, if not as full-featured as Temple of Elemental Evil, but it’s a portable game, and so I can forgive. D&D Tactics is also a good bit less buggy than ToEE. I’m not yet finished with the game, but I give it a B.

Fallout:New Vegas didn’t fare as well. I quit the game before I’d gotten very far. After I learned the game’s main plot in New Vegas, I just lost interest. And I was sure that the robot who was following me from the beginning of the game was going to end up being the main bad guy at the game’s conclusion. Meh. The game gets a C.

I’ve never been as huge a fan of the Mass Effect series as everyone else seems to be. The first one was good, but not amazing. Mass Effect 2 was pretty much the same. Good, but not brilliant. I thought the ending was very well done – I liked that part a lot. In the end, I’ll give Mass Effect 2 a B.

I played a lot of games in 2009. I could manage to count 23 of them, since I’m only looking at games that I played for the first time. This means that I’m not counting Thief: Deadly Shadows, Dungeon Siege, Warcraft 3, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and Beyond Good and Evil, since I’ve played those all before.

That being said, I’m going to go through my list in alphabetical order and try to give some kind of brief rating and review to each of them.

Braid

Amongst downloadable XBox Live Arcade titles, Braid is a superstar. While it doesn’t quite fit in with the casual fare that permeates downloadable console catalogs, it’s a good game to play in small chunks. Many of the puzzles can be so maddeningly difficult as to break your brain, but there’s an immense sense of satisfaction when you finally figure them out.

I played the PC version, since I have no XBox, but while the Steam release had some issues, it was worth the wait. I played it, my wife played it, and I wrote a series of hints that ended up near the top of the google search results.

Braid’s story was a bit hard to follow, introduced as it was in small chunks at the beginning of each of the game’s six worlds, and it got really odd at the end. But the game was more about the puzzles than anything else, so all else is forgivable. I’ll give the game a B.

Crysis

Before its launch, and for a number of months afterwards, Crysis‘s big marketing line was that it would bring your $2000 gaming rig to its knees with its amazing graphics. That’s probably why it didn’t sell as well as the developers might have hoped. Crysis was good, although overall I’ll say that I preferred CryTek’s earlier title Far Cry.

Crysis was almost like two separate games, as the gameplay during the second half is drastically different from the first half. Personally, I prefer the first half, as it was much closer to the gameplay in Far Cry. I could sneak around to scout an area, snipe off a few men, then let the rest come to me. It felt strategic and fun. The zero-gravity segments in the second half of the game were disorienting and confusing. I found myself backtracking unintentionally, and the alien enemies weren’t nearly as interesting to fight as the human opponents. The segments in which you fly a fighter jet were even worse. More often than not, I’d crash and burn but never know exactly what killed me.

Towards the end of the game, during a battle on an aircraft carrier, the game froze. Every time. I was never actually able to see the end of the game, which I assume was well under an hour away. I must have tried twenty times to get through that battle, but the game froze every single time. Considering the non-fun segments and the bug at the end, I’ll have to give Crysis a C+.

Defense Grid: The Awakening

As far as Tower Defense games go, I found Defense Grid to be strictly average. It held my attention long enough to play through the entire game, but I found the aliens to be generic, the story to be uninteresting, and the computer narrator’s melodramatic dialogue to be unbelievable, as the computer got more emotional about a hinted-at past war than most humans would get. The computer’s odd fixation on raspberries was a bit funny, but that small bit of humor didn’t make up for the rest of the game. I’ll give this one a C+.

Dead Space

Being the best survival horror game I’ve played in years is no mean feat. That’s what puts Dead Space in the running for the best game that I played in 2009.

It’s nearly impossible for me to talk about Dead Space without comparing it to Resident Evil, as I believe that Dead Space has neatly filled in the survival horror niche once occupied by the earlier Resident Evil games. But Dead Space is certainly its own animal, and is an entirely new generation of survival horror title. For one thing, Dead Space is more of a shooter than any of the original survival horror games (Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Clocktower) ever were. It has the best collection of weapons I’ve seen in a shooter since Doom 3, a weapon upgrade system that I like even better than Resident Evil’s, and some excellent gameplay elements such as zero-gravity areas, vacuum areas, ship-mounted weaponry for firing at targets in space, and the kinesis and stasis modules.

Dead Space is certainly a game that I’ll return to and play again some day. I’m doubting that I’ll go for the trophy where you have to play the entire game with only a plasma cutter and no other weapons, but I’ll enjoy my replay nonetheless. Dead Space gets a solid A.

Desktop Tower Defense DS

I was a huge fan of the flash version of Desktop Tower Defense for a long time. I still believe it to be one of the best tower defense games ever made. As simple as it is, it’s got a lot of complexity and balance. Building new mazes for the creeps to traverse and arranging things perfectly can be quite a challenge, and if you start on advanced strategies like juggling, things get even more complex. The game begins simple, but has a lot of nuance.

For some reason, since I bought this game, I haven’t played my DS nearly as often as I used to. So I haven’t put a lot of time into the portable verion of Desktop Tower Defense. But they’ve added quite a lot of new modes, plus a number of achievements. Although not being able to share those achievements online somehow detracts from the experience, I’ll still enjoy trying to get them. Probably on an airplane at some point in the future. I’ll give Desktop Tower Defense DS a B-.

Dragon Quest 4 DS

Back in the day, when I played this game on a friend’s NES, I absolutely loved it. The charm and the fun are still there. I haven’t completed Dragon Quest 4 since beginning the NES version, but I’m easily halfway into the game. Once again, I just haven’t spent much time with the DS recently. I know that will change when Scribblenauts drops. But as far as RPGs for the DS, I haven’t seen many better. C+

Fairway Solitaire

While Fairway Solitaire is without doubt a casual game, it takes plain old solitaire and adds a golf theme to make it really interesting. Streaks where you don’t have to use cards from the deck become “long drives”, sandtraps and water hazards become cards that are inaccessible, and you can collect extra golf clubs that act as cards up your sleeve. While explaining these intracacies are beyond the scope of this mini-review, you should take my word that this game is amongst the better casual games that I’ve played this past year. B-

Fallout 3

While I didn’t go through all the expansions like Brandon did, I spent a lot of time playing Fallout 3. I played three characters, and maxxed out my levels on two of them. And even though it wasn’t entirely deserving of the “Oblivion-with-guns” moniker that it got in so many reviews, there was enough of that to detract from the game. All the things that I disliked about the Oblivion engine were still problems in Fallout 3, and none of the things that I’d loved so much about Oblivion were replaced with adequate substitutes. The charm of the first two Fallout titles was likewise lacking. As you can probably tell, I much preferred Oblivion to Fallout 3.Still, I did enjoy my time playing Fallout 3. GFW, while it does suck, gave me the ability to grab some achievements, and I got about 90% of the ones available, including every damn bobblehead in the game. I loved tearing up slavers with the shishkebab, I loved melting Combine troops with a plasma rifle, and that nuclear explosion was a thing of beauty. I’d just love to have seen more Wasteland in Fallout 3. You know, some snake squeezins, or perhaps a Scorpitron. Fallout 3 gets a B.

Far Cry 2
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Far Cry 2. I knew that it was an open-world game and that it was significantly different from both the original Far Cry and from Crysis. Far Cry removed a number of the elements that I’d liked so much about those two games: The science fiction elements, and lying prone for purposes of sneaking. I wish I’d been able to record achievements in the game. I went out of my way to grab every diamond in the northern section of the map – had I been able to get an achievement for it, I’d likely have done the same for the southern map. The game also has some really silly conventions.

Final Fantasy 12
The only other Final Fantasy games I’ve played are Final Fantasy 4 on the DS and Final Fantasy 9 back on the original Playstation. These are loong games. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 12 for years now. I tend to play for 4-6 months before getting burned out and shelving the game for a couple months. But then I go back to it. I’m still only about 2/3 of the way through the game and I plan to go back to it soon, although I’m sure I’ll quickly shelve it again when Borderlands and Dragon Age: Origins come out in October.

Final Fantasy is about story, but it’s also about level grinding. Lots and lots of level grinding. The game’s battles are simply too hard if you move from place to place battling only story-essential foes. Level grinding is absolutely essential. It harks back to old RPGS that I’d played on the Sega Master system. And in Final Fantasy 12, it’s actually a lot of fun to level grind. There’s a lot of inventory management and skill management to do – I’ve got a couple sheets of notebook paper where I’ve got notes sketched out on how my characters’ gear and skills are set up. It reminds me of mapping out Bards Tale or Wizardry dungeons on graph paper. Final Fantasy 12 gets a B. Square Enix knows what they’re doing when it comes to JRPGs.

Galactrix
I absolutely loved Puzzle Quest. And so I was very excited for Galactrix. I’m sad to say that I was seriously disappointed with the game. The touch screen controls are terrible. Selecting the item you want with the stylus is often more of a challenge than fighting battles. And the game’s loading screens are frequent and very long. The game’s minigames can be fun once you unlock them, and tricking out your ship with improved equipment is probably the best part of the game. Overall, Puzzle Quest was a far better game. Galactrix gets a D.

Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters was a mixed bag. There’s a lot of good, and a lot of bad. My biggest complaint about the game is the uneven difficulty. There are some moments that are just way too hard. This forced me to play through the game on “casual” difficulty. I also hit a number of bugs where certain plot triggers just wouldn’t fire, and I had to reload my last save, after which things worked fine.

If you’re going to play this game, play it for the story and the atomosphere, because those were great. The game totally nails the feel of the original movie, and having all four ghostbusters voiced by the actual actors is fantastic. The game is very well written. The plot is probably better than that of the Ghostbusters 2 movie, and there are some really funny one-liners in the game. I have to give this game a C+.

Lost Planet
Seldom have I had a worse experience with a game that I had with the PC port of Lost Planet. Most of my complaints had to do with the fact that it’s the worst PC port of a console game that I’ve ever played, but the game engine is also terrible – I have a hard time imagining that I’d have enjoyed the 360 version much more. This is the only game in my list that gets a definite F.

Mad World
I understand that my negative take on Mad World is primarily opinion. I know that other people (such as Brandon) really enjoyed Mad World. But I didn’t like the game at all. At all. I played nearly halfway through it (I’m guessing) hoping that it would get better, but I eventually just got bored and frustrated.

I’d been expected a new-school brawler that felt like SmashTV or Double Dragon, but what I got was not nearly as fun. At all. I had many complaints about the game overall, but the bottom line is that I just didn’t find it to be fun. At all. Mad World gets a D.

Mass Effect
If Brandon doesn’t kill me for my take on Mad World, then he’ll probably kill me for my take on Mass Effect. In a word: meh. The game was fine, but I didn’t get nearly as much out of it as everyone else seemed to. The story was really interesting, I’ll give you that, and Bioware always does an amazing job with the dialogue. But to me, the gameplay’s the thing. And the engine that Mass Effect ran on (actually, the engine that a lot of Bioware games have run on) felt old and klunky to me.

I played through the whole game – start to finish – but it didn’t grab me. I enjoyed the story, but the gameplay wasn’t there, so I can’t classify it as a keeper. Mass Effect gets a C.

Okami
I’d heard about Okami for a long time before having picked up a copy. I got the Wii version, although Okami was originally a playstation 2 game. And I loved it.

The gameplay in Okami is a lot like the gameplay in the more recent Zelda games – action/adventure. Fetch quests and conversations with some minor platforming and a whole lot of fighting. Also, plenty of minigames. Add to that the innovative magic brush mechanic and you’ve got a winner. But what stood out most to me about Okami were the graphics. They don’t excel by being photorealistic – just the opposite – the stylized graphics in Okami are an excellent argument against photorealism. They look amazing in a far more cartoonish way. Okami gets a B.

Penny Arcade Adventures: Episode 2: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness
I’m a big fan of Penny-Arcade. I love their style of humor, and of course I love the bulk of their subject matter: video games, tabletop gaming, and general geekery. I’ve played and loved both their games. How can you not love a game where you’re battling hobos, mimes, barbershop quartets, insane asylum inmates, and robots with a perverse sexual attraction to fruit? I give this one a B. It’s inexpensive, and if you buy it on Steam, you can shoot for the Steam achievements.

Pixeljunk Monsters
I’ve certainly written enough here about my love for Pixeljunk Monsters. Although I didn’t start playing it in 2009, I likely won’t finish before the end of the year. Honestly, I’ll probably end up putting it aside again as I start playing Muramasa and Scribblenauts. Although I’ve only got two levels remaining in the expansion, there are still plenty of trophy challenges for me to tackle. The “Four Tree Rainbow” challenge is harder than it looked, and the “Rainbow Team” challenge looks to be incredibly difficult. In Pixeljunk Monsters lingo, to “rainbow” a level is to complete it perfectly – without losing a single villager. Pixeljunk Monsters gets an A from me simply because I can’t think of many other games I’ve ever gotten so much prolonged play out of.

Plants vs Zombies
While I’ve enjoyed many Popcap games in the past – Bookworm Adventures and Zuma come to mind – I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed any of them as much as Plants vs Zombies. I only played the game for a couple weeks, but during those weeks, I played it hard. My initial take on the game was a poor one – how could a tower defense game with only six linear lanes have the depth of something like Desktop Tower Defense? You know what? I grew out of that one quickly, and became a Plants vs Zombies addict. Steam offers achievements for the game, and PvZ became the first game on which I’d ever gotten 100% of the achievements. Plants vs Zombies gets an A. It’s all about the spikerocks, gloom shrooms and garlic.

Prototype

I can imagine Prototype being a far better game on a console. Firstly, it might not freeze as often as it did on my Vista machine, although I’m willing to concede that the freezing issue may be related to the import version of the game I’m playing. While the PC controls weren’t terrible, I had some issues with the dashing controls. Firstly, the double-tap on the ‘W’ key for an air dash wouldn’t always register – I’m sure that’s my own fault, but the double-keyboard-tap isn’t the easiest motion on which to get 100% accuracy. Similarly, I found that when dashing, you corner like a passenger jet. So often, I’d sprint past a waypoint or someone I’d intended to grab, then take at least 5 seconds to turn around and run back. And when you’re in a timed event and you’ve only got 60 seconds to do what you’ve got to do, that 5 seconds can make a huge difference.

Although I’m playing a weird Russian import version that I got on Ebay and I can’t actually register achievements, I managed to complete nearly every challenge. I got gold on all but one gliding challenge and managed to complete every infected consume event. The military consume events where you’ve got to consume the commander and then end the alert before getting in can be HARD. And although I found destroying hives and bases with a tank to be super-easy, helicopters are nearly worthless. Granted, they’re the best for fast travel, but they’re difficult to hijack and they get destroyed by one hit from anything.

Also, like Ghostbusters, I can’t imagine playing Prototype on any difficulty other than ‘Easy’. Prototype gets a C+, but it might be a B- on consoles.

Resident Evil 5

I played the Playstation 3 version of Resident Evil 5, and while it was inferior to its predecessors in different ways, it wasn’t a bad game. Resident Evil 5 tried to be Resident Evil 4. But it wasn’t different enough from Resident Evil 4 to really shine, and it didn’t have the charm of Resident Evil 4. There was no mine cart chase, no jetski sequence, and no chance to harpoon lake monsters. There was a nice sequence where you could shoot at enemies from machine guns mounted to the back of a jeep, but that alone didn’t measure up.

Resident Evil 5 only really shines when played co-op. I played with my brother on his XBox over Christmas vacation, and having the game be a shared experience really changed it. For the better. The partner AI in Resident Evil 5 is laughably bad at times. The game gets a B.

Street Fighter 4

After having beaten Seth with every character in the game other than the three big bosses whom I have yet to unlock, I’ve been playing Street Fighter 4 far less. I’ve gotten somewhat competent at online matches, although like so many other online games, the people still playing are the ones who play all the time, and are thus much better at the game than I am. But the game did bring back a good bit of my Street Fighter 2 nostalgia, and despite my hatred of Crimson Viper and Rufus, I really like the game. B+

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
This game totally fails, which is sad. It seemed like it had so much going for it. Great story, a very nice engine with good graphics, and the upgrade and combo system seemed like it was going to work out very nicely. If only it weren’t for all the bottomless pits. There is nothing as maddeningly frustrating as falling into the same pit for the fourth time when you have to wait for 5 minutes in between attempts. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed gets a D for bad platforming.

Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People

I love HomeStarRunner. I really do. So I was super-excited to hear that there was going to be a StrongBad-themed WiiWare game, and I snatched it up as soon as it was available. Sadly, I’d forgotten that I don’t generally like point and click adventure games. And that I’m horribly bad at them. So while HomestarRunner.com gets an A, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People gets a C-.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad gaming year. Granted, there was nothing that stood out like Half-Life 2, Oblivion, or Shadow of the Colossus, but the year isn’t over yet, and I’ve still got to play Scribblenauts, Muramasa, Brutal Legend, Uncharted 2, and Dragon Age: Origins.

Unfortunately, the last content pack, “Mothership Zeta”, ended all of the content on kind of a ho-hum note.  It wasn’t my favorite pack by far, that honor goes to “Point Lookout” but it was still an enjoyable romp.  Plus, you got to punch an alien while you were in your underwear and that’s cool no matter what.

In the interest of appeasing all of the stat-heads out there, I wrote down all of my statistics to show just what I did in my time in the Wastelands.

• Achievements: 72/72
• Achievement points: 1550/1550
• Number of saves: 663
• Time played: 81:25:10 (this is going to be inflated as I’d often pause the game while writing guides by bringing up the PipBoy rather than pausing the game via the pause button)
• Level: 30
• Alignment: True Mortal (Neutral)
• Strength: 9
• Perception: 10(+)
• Endurance: 9
• Charisma: 9
• Intelligence: 9
• Agility: 9
• Luck: 10(+)
• Hit points: 615
• Action points: 113 (+5 from my Ranger Battle Armor)
• Carrying capacity: 290
• Barter: 55
• Big Guns: 100
• Energy Weapons: 100(+)
• Explosives: 60(+)
• Lockpick: 100(+)
• Medicine: 100
• Melee Weapons: 58
• Repair: 100
• Science: 100
• Small Guns: 100
• Sneak: 100
• Speech: 100
• Unarmed: 38
• Quests Completed: 57
• Locations Discovered: 161
• People Killed: 720
• Creatures Killed: 1184
• Locks Picked: 154
• Computers Hacked: 78
• Stimpaks Taken: 176
• Rad-X Taken: 5
• RadAway Taken: 14
• Chems Taken: 7
• Time Addicted: 0
• Mines Disarmed: 33
• Speech Successes: 97
• Pockets Picked: 5
• Pants Exploded: 7
• Books Read: 44
• Bobbleheads Found: 20
• Weapons Created: 7
• People Mezzed: 1
• Captives Rescued: 4
• Sandman Kills: 21
• Paralyzing Punches: 0
• Robots Disabled: 9
• Contracts Completed: 0
• Corpses Eaten: 0
• Mysterious Stranger Visits: 0

Those last few are perk related which is why I didn’t have any.  I didn’t take whatever perk lets you disable robots until much later in the game, during Broken Steel so there weren’t many robots left to disable.  It was hella useful though, so I wish I had gotten it earlier.  Ditto with upping my repair skill.  Being able to repair your own stuff is a great money saving device.  Then again, the money you save by repairing your own stuff is probably balanced out by keeping weapons rather than selling them so that you have materials for repair.  I would have liked to have picked the Mysterious Stranger perk too just to see what it looked like, but at the same time, I think I did ok without it.  I’m sure I can find something on YouTube to shoe me what it looked like.

In the end, I really enjoyed the game and am sad to see it go.  It will be interesting to see what goes on in New Vegas but at the same time, it’s not the same studio, so I’m thinking that New Vegas: Fallout 3 as Fallout 3: Fallout 1 & 2.  It will still be good, just a different take on Fallout.

For now though, my character is safely at home, ready for whatever else comes his way.  After I returned from Mothership Zeta I headed to Vault 101 to pick up Dogmeat and then we both went back home to Megaton.  I put all of my alien gear and trophies in my locker, put on the armor, Shady Hat and Ghoul Mask I wore for most of the game and equipped the plasma rifle that had gotten me through so many scrapes.  Then I went upstairs and took a seat, dog by my side.  After all of this time in the Wastelands, I think I deserved a little rest.

The other thing (and this is for you, Brandon) is news that might make me consider buying a DSi, despite the fact that I’m impoverished and I already have a DS. Techradar wrote an article, in which they report that It looks highly likely that leading VoIP software Skype will be heading to the Nintendo DSi at some point in the near future. That would enable those with a headset to use a DSi in place of a cell phone, as some people can already do with a PSP. Eat your heart out, N-Gage.

I’ll totally agree that Fallout 3 has better minigames. They got rid of that hideous conversation game and even the lockpick game in Fallout 3 is much improved. The new computer hacking game is simply awesome. Fallout 3 also has better character models and better voice acting. But all these things can’t change the fact that Oblivion was simply a better game.

First of all, Oblivion had much more creative and ingenious quests. The Daedric quests that granted special magical items, the arena, the dark brotherhood, the various guild quests, and the beautiful world-inside-a-painting are a few examples. Other quests in Obilivion had you trailing people, eavesdropping, following hand-drawn maps, and interpreting drawings on walls. Nothing that creative in Fallout 3. A few good characters and some funny conversations, but being able to talk through intercoms and watching static animations of vertibirds can’t match up with having to cast a high level lightning spell on an old stump in the middle of the wilderness to complete a quest.

Next up, the mods. Perhaps it was because I picked up Oblivion six or eight months after its release, and there’s also the fact that the Garden of Eden Creation Kit wasn’t released for Fallout 3 until months after the game was on store shelves. But for me, one of the things that made Oblivion truly great was the wealth of user mods. The BT Mod and Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul were by far the best Oblivion mods, but consider also the user-created music for Oblivion, the much needed No Psychic Guards mod, and a couple favorites of mine, the Darker Dungeons mod, which gave torches and light spells an actual purpose, and the Drop Lit Torches mod, which caused you to drop a lit torch when you drew a weapon. The torch would remain there on the ground, lit, and you could pick it back up if you needed. Fantastic.

What mods does Fallout 3 have? Mostly new and reskinned weapons. Of course, there are plenty of cheat mods and things to make you more powerful. They’ve got a decent start with the mods that remove slow motion from V.A.T.S. and allow you to use random logical items to repair weapons and armor, and Bethesda has blogged about some mods, but they’re nothing approaching the genius of the best Oblivion mods.

Third on my list is Alchemy. Here’s a genius engaging skill that has you hunting everywhere for different types of flora and vegetation and allows you to collect different equipment to create dozens of different potions, or mix multiple-effect potions as your skill increases. What does Fallout 3 have to compare? Collecting random junk like medical braces and lunchboxes to create a handful of weapons, many of which are fairly useless. Come on – did you really like the railroad spike gun? Did you find the Rock-It Launcher useful? Granted, the dart gun is great and I love the deathclaw gauntlet, but overall Fallout 3’s item crafting can’t match Oblivion’s alchemy system.

One of the primary things that made Oblivion better than Fallout 3 was the set pieces. The fall of Kvatch, leading a squad of soldiers through an Oblivion gate to try to close it, and stopping that crazy giant war machine were truly epic, and those are just the moments I can remember off the top of my head. What were Fallout 3’s set pieces? Umm… the giant robot at the end? The optional nuke? That’s all I can think of. Oblivion had a much more epic feel.

Lastly, the novelty. When Oblivion came out, it was brand new, and it was very impressive. But at the time Oblivion is coming out, we’re seeing the same NPCs, the same kinds of traps, and the whole same game engine. But no there are no spells, no new abilities as skills reach the 25/50/75/100 points, no shield blocking, and none of the beautiful weather effects that Oblivion had. The game’s drugs are a poor replacement for Oblivion’s alchemy system, and the weaponcrafting in Fallout 3 is extremely limited. I’d have felt a bit better if Fallout 3 had implemented a few vehicles. Even Oblivion had crappy, crappy horses.

• Fragmentation Grenade: While not the most powerful weapon, they’re very common, and they’re useful as hell. Any time I see a group of enemies or I need to attack around corners, I’d better have a frag grenade or ten on me. Throw enough grenades and you’ll be taking down sentry bots like they’re radroaches.
• Chinese Assault Rifle: The best of the small guns, this will be a mainstay weapon throughout the game. The ammo is common enough that you don’t have to be overly conservative.
• Gatling Laser: The best of the big guns, I’m still not quite sure why the Gatling laser wasn’t categorized as an energy weapon, but unlike the minigun this one is actually useful and marginally accurate. Too bad ammo is so hard to come by.
• Bottlecap Mine: Who knew that if you put a cherry bomb in a lunchbox with a bunch of bottlecaps it would explode so violently as to create a small mushroom cloud? Anyway, the bottlecap mine is the biggest baddest landmine in the game, and I love to lay them out and lead enemies along a trail of them. Somehow, they never realize what I’m doing.
• The Alien Blaster: It almost feels like cheating to use the alien blaster. I suppose it’s good that ammo is so limited, because the weapon is way too ovepowered. But it is fun to use.
• The Terrible Shotgun: Not a big fan of the name, but it’s the game’s best shotgun. And it does lots and lots of damage. So I ended up using it quite a bit. I’ve always liked shotguns in games, and this one will take the head off a supermutant in one hit at close range, especially if you take it by surprise.
• Deathclaw Gauntlet: The deathclaw gauntlet isn’t much better than a regular power fist until you fight heavily armored opponents. I’m currently playing an unarmed character, and taking down Mirelurks and Super Mutants in melee is fun. I’ve been partial to the “Fisto!” and “Shocker” power fists, but I think the Deathclaw Gauntlet wins, since it ignores damage resistance. Watch out, Enclave.
• Shishkebab: My plan for my third character is to max out his strength and melee skills, give him the pyromaniac perk, and have him use the shishkebab exclusively. It’s a frelling flaming sword. What’s not to love?
• Plasma Rifle: The plasma rifle is the best energy weapon, and I’m currently playing an energy weapon focused character. But what makes it really cool is how the enemies melt into green puddles when you get a really good hit. It’s also got a phenomenal rate of fire. Zapzapzap.
• Dart Gun: What? Are you nuts, Greg? Your favorite weapon in the game is the dart gun? Yes. It is. And I’ll tell you why. Against some of the tougher melee-only enemies like mirelurks, deathclaws, and giant radscorpions, the dart gun makes fights cake. Just shoot them in the legs, and there’s no way they can catch you. Then you simply stay out of their reach and blast them with a shotgun. Easy. And the ammo is very easy to come by.

I’ve got to say, overall I’m a bit disappointed in Fallout 3. What I’d wanted was a game much closer to Fallout 1 and 2. That is to say, a role playing game with turn-based strategy elements. What I got instead was something much closer to Oblivion, which is of course not a bit surprising given that Fallout 3 uses Oblivion’s game engine. And while there are a great many differences between Oblivion and Fallout 3, the new game fails to capture the spirit of the original two titles. If only the good folks at Bethesda had played through Wasteland and taken copious notes.

Still, I can’t claim that I’m not enjoying the game. I enjoyed Oblivion quite a lot, and even if I do wish that Fallout 3 had a greater number of weapons, something akin to Oblivion’s alchemy system, and vehicles (a drivable jeep, tank, or helicopter would be really nice) I’m still enjoying the game. I’m finding that I love the combat shotgun, Chinese assault rifle, and sniper rifle, and that I don’t like the minigun, laser rifle, or hunting rifle very much. Grenades and mines? Awesome. Rock-it launcher? Piece of crap. And the flaming shishkebab sword is made of win.

I’m cranking up my stealth, explosives, and repair skills, as well as my big guns skill. While I’m not a fan of the minigun, the rocket launcher and flamer are very nice, and I look forward to eventually finding some kind of gatling laser. It really does seem like the small guns skill is the most valuable skill so long as you’re using V.A.T.S., but I can’t help but wish for something more. This playthrough, I’ve totally eschewed conversation as an option – my charisma is 3, speech is 14, and I made my character ass-ugly. Yet despite the fact that I’ve sold two people into slavery, my karma is simply through the roof. And I’d thought this was gonna be my bad guy playthrough. Oh well, maybe I’ll go back and free the people I enslaved. Meh. I’ll do it right after I enslave the three others on my list. That way I get the achievement for enslaving them, plus I get to free more people.

Man, I’d never considered the sick kind of thinking that achievements produce. Can you imagine how people in the game would view that kind of behavior if they were real people rather than rudimentary AI? That guy is effing crazy! He just helped that lady get all the notes together for her Wasteland Survival Guide, then blew up the entire town before she could get the book written!

But the characters in the game are themselves a bit off their rockers too. I’ve talked to people who claimed that they could fix just about anything, and then when I went into the fix menu, I’d find that their repair skill was 12. And the physics are a bit off sometimes too. And I’m not just talking about revisiting an area where you’ve killed a few supermutants to find their corpses convulsing wildly for 10 seconds or so after your arrival, coourtesy of bad ragdoll physics. I’m talking about that time when I was running along, my trusty mutt Dogmeat at my side, and he bumped a barrel as he passed it. The barrel flew through the air and hit me, nearly killing me. Seriously! That heartbeat sound started and I had to take a stimpack quick before Dogmeat ran over and stepped on my foot or something.

I’ve got a few gripes about the whole Windows LIVE! system too. After I’d been playing the game for long enough to get my first character up to level 10 or so, I decided to click that “LIVE” button to see what it did. It prompted me to connect to my windows live account, and when the whole thing was done, I’d lost the ability to use my old character. Oh sure, I could’ve signed out of Windows LIVE and kept playing, but it’s sure more fun when you can get those achievements. Heck – this is the first achievement of any sort I’ve gotten. So I created the ugly mofo you see at the left here and started all over.

Also, the interface they ported over from XBox live is just plain broken. I’m sure it works great if you’ve got a 360 controller, but with a mouse it’s nearly unusable. The buttons act as if they’re about 25 pixels away from where they actually are. If your mouse is over a button, clicking it generally won’t work. You’ll need to click a little ways below it or to the side. Effing broken.

I’m also dying for some good community mods for this game. Given the amazing mods that were available for Oblivion, I know it’ll only be a matter of time before we see mods that change and improve AI, mods that add Fallout 2’s traits, mods that slow you down when holding a minigun and speed you up when unarmed, or mods that add new monsters like golden geckos, giant rats, and cyborgs. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even get a proton axe.

This is something that had driven me absolutely nuts. When I started playing Fallout 3 on Tuesday, I decided that it would make sense to map the V.A.T.S. key, which defaults to “V”, to my mouse 4 button instead. After all, I bought this nice fancy mouse specifically so I could do stuff like that. It’s a pain in the ass to struggle looking for the “V” key to pause the game while you’re being shot at or while a Deathclaw is rushing up on you.

The first night I played Fallout 3, I perused the above menu, selected “V.A.T.S. Targeting”, and tried to hit the mouse 4 button. It just wouldn’t work. Crap, I thought. And I eventually decided it wasn’t possible. I even Googled it later, and found people on forums complaining about the same thing.

Last night, I found out how to do it. See that “Device” key at the bottom right? Yeah – I’d mostly ignored it too. When you click that, it gives you a slightly different menu in which the “Keyboard” text at the top changes to “Mouse’, and you’re able to map controls to the mouse. Viola. Hopefully the next person who Googles this problem ends up here instead and finds their solution. So now I’ve got my mouse 4 button mapped to start V.A.T.S. and my mouse wheel set up to use items. For what will I use my mouse 5 button? I’ve yet to decide.

I’ve been looking forward to Fallout 3. A lot. I’d be happy skipping Spore, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and the new Ghostbusters game, so long as I get to play Fallout 3. At PAX, Bethesda released the Fallout 3 survival guide in pdf format. What can I say? It’s made of win. You can download a pdf copy of the survival guide, or pop over to Joystiq’s gallery to see the whole thing as a series of jpegs.

I’ve got boxed copies of the first two Fallout games at home, along with the accompanying manuals, and this one is keeping with the theme of the first two games. This makes Greg happy. I am very much looking forward to clubbing molerats, eating brahmin burgers, and nuking supermutants with a Fat Boy.